httpd-dev mailing list archives

> What do you think of the following? I would really like to see this
> become a standard module of Apache, but that decision remains to the
> Apache core group of course :-)
>
> This is just a quick start, I would like to start coding once I have
> a specification and enough input from people on the list. (Is this
> the correct place to discuss this?)
>
> Waddayathink?
First, consider this biased due to my involvement with PHP.
I have a document which looks a lot like this one. It involves
abstracting areas of the PHP internal API to allow multiple parsers to be
plugged in, much like ASP. PHP already uses the <% %> tag-style for
example, and if you hook in an ECMAScript engine, for all practical
purposes you have mod_asp. It would use all the database connectivity
modules already written for PHP which includes a whole whack of native
library modules plus ODBC support which is essential to any ASP
application.
Now, this has been in the works for well over 3 years. And there is still
a lot of work to do.
There is also an Apache::ASP mod_perl module which has been under
development for at least 6 months while the database connectivity stuff
has been under development for years and is quite mature.
You didn't say anything about how you are planning to provide database
connectivity from this language. Just writing that code could take you a
couple of years. You would be better off taking either Perl's or PHP's
database connectivity code. Or maybe using JDBC, I suppose. But once you
start doing that it would make more sense to join one of these existing
projects and try to work within the framework of that to attach an
existing ECMAScript parser engine.
I am as interested as you in getting full ASP support in Apache, but it is
not a trivial job and if it is to be done, I don't think it is in our
best interests to start from scratch. Let's leverage some of the work
that has already been done.
-Rasmus